Measuring the success of SEO is a challenge, but it can’t be done if you’re looking at “vanity metrics” instead of numbers that matter to your business success. Read this to understand the difference between Key Performance Indicators and Vanity Performance Indicators and get ideas that will improve your marketing.
Kate: Can you imagine a life where everything was just easy? You know, like where you ask for things, and then people just bring them to you?
Jack: It’s wonderful…
– “The Family Man” (2000)
Ah yes, wouldn’t it be nice if you could read some sage bit of Search Engine Optimization or Digital Marketing advice, call in one of your well trained staff members, ask them to implement and simply wait for them to bring you the results?
Is SEO training just one more thing on your plate? Then only worry about the essentials!
I don’t know about you, but that ain’t the business world I operate in. I grew up in small business, literally, and I’ve spent the last 35+ years in a world where managing a business or a department tends to be like fighting 5 fires in a high wind with a garden hose and a shovel.
Taking time away from all the other concerns of a hectic day to become an expert in SEO simply isn’t an option for most small business managers. If you’re like me, you long for information that is stripped down to the essentials.
It’s to fill that need in SEO that we created a new online training course called “Real World SEO: Essentials.” This course is designed to cut through all the stuff that no one in the “real world” will ever do and focus on the meaningful concepts and the realistic actions most busy small businesses CAN take based on knowing those concepts.
The course is divided into 9 modules and is approximately 6 hours of video training.
This course wasn’t just designed for business owners. It is designed for ANYONE who has to get their website seen while managing other business operations.
It’s also a perfect class for Web developers who need to perform SEO for their clients but need to focus ONLY on the essentials that will have the best shot at results.
Finally, if you’re a marketing professional who is expected to manage, or simply know about, Search Engine Optimization, this course is a compact way to bring you up to speed on those concepts that will benefit your clients and put you ahead of most other marketing agencies who are after their SEO business.
Get the First 3 Modules for Free
Already know you want the full course? Sign up here and take $50 off (this introductory offer is only good through January 31st, 2017)
We know how valuable your time is, otherwise you probably wouldn’t have been interested in the premise of this post. So instead of forcing you to commit to a purchase of the full 9 modules, we’re giving away the first 3 absolutely free. Once you sign up you’ll also get a downloadable free bonus: our SEO Workflow Journal, a template similar to what our agency uses for managing an SEO project.
The free sampler we’re giving away carries a double benefit: Not only will you have an idea of the value of the training before you purchase the full course, but regardless of whether you get the full course, you’ll get valuable and actionable insights.
What you’ll learn in Real World SEO: Essentials
Get the First 3 Modules for Free
Already know you want the full course? Sign up here and take $50 off (this introductory offer is only good through January 31st, 2017)
Module 2 – Basic Understanding (22 minutes)
Module 3 – Evaluating Your Website (36 minutes)
Module 4 – Make it Search Engine Friendly (SEF) (62 minutes)
Module 5 – Keyword Research (58 minutes)
Module 6 – Relevancy (56 minutes)
Module 7 – Authority (43 minutes)
Module 8 – Conversion Optimization (27 minutes)
Module 9 – Managing Your SEO (21 minutes)
Bonus Materials
Get the First 3 Modules for Free
Already know you want the full course? Sign up here and take $50 off (this introductory offer is only good through January 31st, 2017)
Hey, got a minute?
Or maybe two? One thing that’s in ever shorter supply is time. We deal with dozens of business people. Managers, owners, marketing execs, even office workers and customer service reps. No one has extra time.
But here’s the challenge in digital marketing: it depends on knowledge. Make a mistake and the market will punish you. Make a different kind of mistake and your competitors will punish you. Make an even different kind of mistake and Google will punish you.
At Horizon Web Marketing our practice is built on SEO and related forms of digital media. We know firsthand how frustrating it is for business people to know even what “SEO” is (other than to search on the acronym and find out it means “Search Engine Optimization”), much less to make use of it to promote their websites.
And so, we decided to try for an achievable educational goal for our clients: a series of videos that we have dubbed “2-Minute SEO.” The videos are stripped to the bone to help non-SEO-professionals to understand what they need to know about SEO.
Our first set of 10 videos examines 10 of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) that we get about SEO. In future videos we will examine not only the “frequently” asked questions, but the “should” ask questions that will make you empowered in buying and managing your digital marketing efforts.
Sign up for our e newsletter to stay in touch with new releases. Our goal is to release 1 new video every week. Since we also do SEO training, our videos are designed to instruct, not to give you a sales pitch. So sit back and enjoy that SEO ride.
To see our current selection of 2-minute SEO videos: click here.
Over the years we’ve noticed increasing personalization of search. This is the practice followed by search engines of providing one set of search results to one searcher and a different set to another searcher even though they are entering the exact same search query.
Related to personalization is localization. I normally lump localization of search and personalization of search in the same category because they both do the same thing: customize search results to better fit the intent of the individual searcher.
Whenever you perform a search, you are connecting to the Internet using an I.P. Address, or number. This is a unique number that identifies your Internet connection. I.P. numbers are typically identifiable in general geographic locales. For example if I connect to the Internet here in my office in Grand Junction, Colorado and do a search on Google, even though Google can’t see who I am, they can see that my I.P. number is based in Grand Junction. This allows Google to display search results that take into account my searching location. Google will favor, sometimes strongly, Grand Junction business websites based on my location.
This presents a bit of a challenge for an Internet professional such as myself, since I work with businesses all over the country and I need to see how well they rank for a Google search.
In the past the Google search location settings have come to my rescue. I can conduct a search, click on “Search Tools,” and set my location to “Las Vegas NV,” for example. (See screen capture below)
But this method is no longer effective for me, because it appears that Google is displaying a different set of results based on whether I specify my search location or let them determine it automatically from my i.p. number.
This creates a problem for a business owner or marketing professional who is wondering just how visible their company website is on a Google search within a particular geographic region, especially if they are not physically in the area they are checking.
Let’s look at the following example, based on one of our own clients. The client in question is the dominant mover in the Las Vegas market, Move 4 Less. Move 4 Less is a local Las Vegas company that regularly beats out national competitors in search results. If I run a search for “Moving Companies” from my Western Colorado location with my search tools set to “Las Vegas Nevada,” here’s what I will see:
Our client shows below the 7-pack, way below the fold in my Colorado search, even thought I’ve specified a location of Las Vegas NV.
Here’s the same search conducted by my colleague Matt from his desktop in Las Vegas. Note how our client is showing up smack in the middle of the local results (the so-called 7-pack), which is far higher on the page:
The physical location is not trumping the location setting in Google Search tools, it appears to be the other way around. The Search tools setting is actually over-riding the results given by a plain-vanilla search conducted in the physical region. How do I know? Note this last screen shot. It is the same search done from the Las Vegas location, but with the Search tools setting set to “Las Vegas.” Here the geographic data is trumped and distorted in a very unpredictable way, showing a set of results identical to those I got in Colorado:
Search setting trumps physical location. But why it produces the results it does is anyone’s guess.
The take away from all of this is simple: don’t trust your own searches – or even your own eyeballs – when it comes to evaluating how visible your Website is in Google searches. Many businesses obsess over “Googling” their “money” keyword terms, but this is such an imperfect way to measure it’s becoming almost useless. There are better ways to determine visibility in Google search results, but I’ll leave those for another post.
(Or, if you can’t wait for that future post, either hire Horizon Web Marketing to do some consulting for you, or sign up for one of the SEO workshops that I’ll be teaching in Las Vegas this year.)
Are you a business who depends on local customers? If you are, then you probably are already keenly aware of the growing importance of client reviews in the health of your business, and the growing importance of Yelp when it comes to reviews.
Well yeah, maybe. But a lot of the people who love you on Yelp may never show up to your customers!
But have you ever had this happen? A client tells you that they left you a nice review on Yelp. Pleased and encouraged, you visit your Yelp page to see what they wrote. You look and look and…to your confusion you can’t find their review anywhere?
If you know what we’re talking about you’re one of the many small businesses who have had their valuable Yelp reviews filtered.
So why does Yelp filter reviews? They don’t trust the authenticity of them, because well, many of the reviews left on Yelp are fakes.
Now, while it’s understandable that Yelp would try to filter out fake reviews, it’s unfortunate that they do such a crappy job of it. For one of my clients, Yelp didn’t trust 21 of 24 reviews that legitimate Yelpers left on their site. In fact, they filtered out all of this company’s positive reviews and only left 3 negative reviews.
Here’s how to see those phantom reviews. Visit your business listing on Yelp. Then scroll down to the section that says “About this Business.” Right above that you might seem a line that says “[number] other reviews that are not currently recommended” (see screen capture, below).
If you’re missing some reviews that you thought had been placed, go and see if they are parked in Yelp’s “dead letter” graveyard.
Here’s how you can avoid having your best reviews end up in this lonesome place where no one will read them:
Keep in mind that all of the review sites prohibit you from soliciting reviews, so never offer to trade discounts, cash or favors for a positive review. You can mention that you encourage reviews, but don’t tell them you want “positive” reviews or you could be in trouble with more sites than Yelp.
Have you had an experience, good or bad, with Yelp’s review filter? We’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you’d like help with local search engine optimization, read more about what we offer.
